Keep Your Cool When Using Teflon

· Don't preheat a nonstick pan before adding the butter or oil for sautéing. (On uncoated metal pan surfaces, heating the pan before adding the fat reduces the food's tendency to stick. With a nonstick pan, that's unnecessary.)

· Don't sear meat in a nonstick pan or on a nonstick grill. (In my opinion, Teflon-coated grills and grill pans should be banned because grilling temperatures can reach 700 degrees.)

· Don't broil in a Teflon-coated pan. (Broiling temperatures can easily exceed 1,000 degrees.)

· Keep your pet birds out of the kitchen and always use the exhaust hood.

For almost 50 years, PFOA and its derivatives have been used in the manufacture of thousands of products such as water- and stain-resistant treatments for fabrics and packaging materials, and firefighting foams, in addition to nonstick cookware. Today, low levels of PFOA chemicals can be found widely dispersed in the environment, including drinking water supplies and, most alarmingly, in the blood of virtually all Americans. PFOA is a man-made chemical not found in nature and is virtually indestructible once it enters the environment.

How did the PFOA get there? Certainly, no one believes that it came from nonstick cookware coatings. The prevailing opinion is that it must have come from the manufacturing plants.

DuPont acknowledges that in 1999, the baseline year for proposed PFOA factory emission reductions, its facilities around the world emitted 142,600 pounds of PFOA into the air and water, 86,800 pounds of which was from its Washington Works near Parkersburg, W.Va. On Sept. 9, 2004, DuPont agreed to pay up to $343 million to settle a class-action lawsuit arising from the contamination of drinking water in areas of West Virginia and Ohio near the Parkersburg plant.

On Jan. 25 of this year, the EPA "requested" that DuPont, the sole producer of PFOA in the United States since 3M ceased production in 2002, commit to a phased reduction in the amounts of PFOA in its products and factory emissions. In settlement of a lawsuit launched by the EPA in 2004, DuPont had already been fined $10.3 million and promised to spend an additional $6.3 million on environmental projects.

It's not over yet. DuPont, and the hundreds of manufacturers to whom it sells Teflon, can expect to see a tsunami of product liability and toxic tort lawsuits involving Teflon-coated cookware. According to Jones Day, an international law firm of more than 2,200 lawyers, class-action lawsuits with as many as 10 million plaintiffs have already been filed in 13 states.

The next word on the controversy will probably come from the courts.

Robert L. Wolke (http://www.robertwolke.com) is professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh. His latest book is "What Einstein Told His Cook 2, the Sequel: Further Adventures in Kitchen Science" (W.W. Norton, 2005). He can be reached atwolke@pitt.edu.